Kill Your Taste Buds - Eating Clean

The American diet is a disaster, right?  Fast food, take-out, frozen dinners, processed processed processed.  Many people feel they’re virtuously eating healthy when they eat a microwaved frozen vegetable that comes in its own “cheese” sauce.

This is not healthy and you know it.  MSG, artificial flavors, salt, fat, sugar, corn syrup, artificial sweeteners—they’ve all done a number on your taste buds.  Your taste buds are desensitized, overwhelmed, and overstimulated.  It’s like a porn addiction—the longer you sit in your basement watching porn and avoiding human beings, the more hardcore and intense of stimulation you need, and the less attractive the kind, wholesome girl with a crush on you becomes.  Plain steamed broccoli has a crush on you, and you’re ignoring her.

Junk food is a gateway drug.  To more junk food.

What to do about it?  Eat clean.  Shop the perimeter of the grocery store.  Seek out fresh, simple foods, and then don’t doctor them up.  If you’re on a meal replacement plan, eat the meals more or less as they are provided, without trying to turn them into a Cadbury Creme Egg.

Your food will seem bland and boring for a while.  It might be hard to make yourself eat a salad that doesn’t get 95% of its calories from the blue cheese dressing you have ladled onto it.  But try.  Know that your taste buds will readjust, faster than you think.

I often eat my salads without dressing.  I eat cabbage plain, with just a little salt sprinkled on it.  I order my meat in restaurants without any sauce, butter, or oil on it.  Plain steamed food tastes wonderful to me.

Did I start off there?  Hell no.  I was putting enough butter on my food that I could buy it at Costco.  I live alone.  I was quite happy to go through a drive through a couple times a week.  I ate canned chili with cream cheese in it, scooped up with tortilla chips.  I was a fatty with fatty taste buds.

I went through withdrawal from the overstimulation.  It went along with the withdrawal from being able to comfort eat, and the physical carb withdrawal.  It was all incredibly painful and I just suffered through it.

But now I’m a girl who spits out a tater tot.  It was disgusting.  I can’t imagine going back to blue cheese salad dressing—all that fat, for what?  Yuck.  The veggies are delicious.  Now my taste buds are my allies in my lifetime task of keeping my weight off.

A fat man commented on the protein bar I was eating—he said they all tasted chalky to him.  Yes, they do, when you’re comparing them to deep-fried calamari and tiramisu.  But when you’re comparing them to plain grilled chicken breast with a little salt and garlic powder on it, they taste like rich deliciousness.

Reset your baseline for how food should taste.  It will help your health long-term, and it will help you stay on your food plan now.